Translating Breaches of Intersubjective Constraints on Interaction: the Case of Swearing in Roddy Doyle's Novel The Commitments - Érudit
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Meta
Journal des traducteurs
Translators’ Journal
Translating Breaches of Intersubjective Constraints on
Interaction: the Case of Swearing in Roddy Doyle’s Novel The
Commitments
Annjo Klungervik Greenall
Volume 56, Number 3, September 2011 Article abstract
This article investigates the translation of breaches of Gricean maxims (and
URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1008332ar other constraints on interaction) in situations where the “same”
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/1008332ar maxim/constraint displays different normative strengths within two cultures.
It is argued that if a breach of such constraints is transferred directly, the result
See table of contents will be a different degree of attention-getting effect and a possible change in
the implicature in the target text. This point is illustrated by the analysis of the
Norwegian translation of the Irish novel The Commitments. Here the translator
perhaps unwittingly ignores the fact that the “swearing constraint” is stronger
Publisher(s)
in Norwegian than in Irish English. Many of the breaches are transferred more
Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal or less directly, which means that the translation contains a number of
potential shifts: the potential attention-getting effect is far stronger, and the
ISSN (social) implicature is most likely skewed, at least for a generalized segment of
the audience.
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Cite this article
Greenall, A. K. (2011). Translating Breaches of Intersubjective Constraints on
Interaction: the Case of Swearing in Roddy Doyle’s Novel The Commitments.
Meta, 56(3), 538–556. https://doi.org/10.7202/1008332ar
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https://www.erudit.org/en/Translating Breaches of Intersubjective
Constraints on Interaction: the Case of Swearing
in Roddy Doyle’s Novel The Commitments
annjo klungervik greenall*
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
annjo.k.greenall@hf.ntnu.no
RÉSUMÉ
Le présent article examine la traduction des transgressions des maximes de Grice (et
d’autres contraintes interactionnelles) dans les situations où la même maxime/contrainte
révèle des forces normatives différentes dans deux cultures distinctes. Nous avançons
ainsi que le transfert direct de la transgression de ces contraintes entraîne une modifica-
tion du degré d’attention sollicitée et de l’implicature du texte cible. Cette proposition
sera illustrée par l’analyse de la traduction norvégienne du roman irlandais The
Commitments où le traducteur, involontairement peut-être, ne tient pas compte du fait
que la contrainte associée à la production de jurons est plus forte en norvégien qu’en
anglais irlandais. Bon nombre de transgressions étant plus ou moins directement trans-
férées, cette traduction, de toute évidence, donne matière à des changements. En effet,
tout au moins pour la majorité des lecteurs de la traduction, l’attention peut être sol-
licitée plus intensément et l’implicature (sociale) est très probablement altérée.
ABSTRACT
This article investigates the translation of breaches of Gricean maxims (and other con-
straints on interaction) in situations where the “same” maxim/constraint displays differ-
ent normative strengths within two cultures. It is argued that if a breach of such
constraints is transferred directly, the result will be a different degree of attention-getting
effect and a possible change in the implicature in the target text. This point is illustrated
by the analysis of the Norwegian translation of the Irish novel The Commitments. Here
the translator perhaps unwittingly ignores the fact that the “swearing constraint” is
stronger in Norwegian than in Irish English. Many of the breaches are transferred more
or less directly, which means that the translation contains a number of potential shifts:
the potential attention-getting effect is far stronger, and the (social) implicature is most
likely skewed, at least for a generalized segment of the audience.
MOTS- CLÉS/KEY WORDS
Grice, maximes, viol / transgression des maximes, implicature sociale, jurons
Grice, maxims, flouting of maxims, social implicature, swearing
One possible way of describing the process of creating a written text is as an activity
fluctuating between observing extra-textual, textual, and linguistic constraints govern-
ing the given text type and communicative situation, and breaching the selfsame
constraints, either unintentionally, or if intentionally, in measures prescribed by the
given text type and communicative situation. The notion of “intentionally breaching
constraints (on interaction)” is intended to include but also to expand on language
philosopher H. P. Grice’s (1989: 30) notion of flouting, which he defines as the deliberate
contravention of a conversational maxim with the intention of generating an implicature.
Meta LVI, 3, 2011
01.Meta 56.3.cor 3.indd 538 12-02-22 10:14 PMtranslating breaches of intersubjective constraints on interaction 539
Both observances and breaches (but particularly the latter) present challenges to
the translator, mainly because the constraints in question are culturally specific. This
cultural specificity comes in different forms. For instance, some constraints can be
said to be in force in culture A but not in culture B. This may be problematic when
the constraint in question is breached – flouted – in a source text (ST), since there
may be no obvious way of re-creating the breach and its potential effect in the target
text (TT). The locus of interest here, however, is slightly different, namely where the
given constraint arguably exists both in the source culture (SC) and the target culture
(TC), but where the constraints display slight differences in their workings within
the two cultures. More specifically, the main focus of this article is cases where the
“same” constraint is, arguably, normatively weaker in the SC than in the TC because
this means that a breach of the given constraint in the ST will have a weaker potential
attentional-interpretational (a-i) effect (i.e., potential degree of hearer/reader attention
and interpretational activity), than a re-constructed breach of the same constraint
in the TT. This point is illustrated by looking at selected examples from the
Norwegian translation of the Irish writer Roddy Doyle’s novel The Commitments
(1988).1 The numerous instances of swearing in the ST are considered instances of
breach of a “swearing constraint,” which, it is argued, exists both in Irish and in
Norwegian culture but is weaker in the former than in the latter. This ought, perhaps,
to have entailed a toning down of the swearing in the Norwegian translation, at least
if equivalent effect is aimed for, but the opposite seems to be the case. The translator
translates all of the swearing and then some (thus blatantly violating the Norwegian
swearing constraint), as well as translating some conventionalized swearing by non-
conventionalized swearing. Here, it is demonstrated how this results in a potentially
stronger a-i effect in the TT than in the ST, and a blurring of the breach-produced
social (Mao 1996) or expressive (Altieri 1981) implicature.
To begin with, however, relevant aspects of Grice’s theory of the Cooperative
Principle (CP) (Grice 1989: 22-40) are presented and their use in the analysis of lit-
erature and literary translation is defended, before a re-interpretation of the Gricean
notion of maxims as intersubjective constraints on interaction is presented, together
with an outline of the various ways in which such constraints may be culturally
specific.
1. Maxims as intersubjective constraints on interaction and their
cultural variability
Paul Grice’s CP states that speakers generally tend to observe the following conver-
sational maxims:
– Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current
purposes of the exchange), and Do not make your contribution more informative
than is required;
– Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true (Supermaxim); Do not say
what you believe to be false, and Do not say that for which you lack adequate evi-
dence;
– Relation: Be relevant;
– Manner: Be perspicuous (Supermaxim); Avoid obscurity of expression, Avoid ambi-
guity, Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity), and Be orderly.
01.Meta 56.3.cor 3.indd 539 12-02-22 10:14 PM540 Meta, LVI, 3, 2011
Although speakers will tend to observe these maxims, they will also, upon occa-
sion, choose not to observe them. The act of deliberately choosing not to observe one
or more of the maxims for the purpose of communicating something Grice called
flouting, and the product of this act he called implicature.2 This theory has recently
been expanded to include a consideration of the more comprehensive potential effects
of breaches and flouts, including that of causing a heightened degree of attention to
what is going on, and that of causing increased interpretational activity (here termed
a-i effects), generating, among other things, implicatures (Greenall, in press).
The original CP has often been seen as specifically geared towards oral exchanges
(see, for example, Malmkjær 1998: 25, 31), despite the fact that several of Grice’s most
famous examples have been of written exchanges (see Grice 1989: 33). Malmkjær
points to the possibility that implicatures might be somewhat more difficult to work
out in situations where the participants do not have face-to-face access to each other,
but goes on to conclude that this is not an insurmountable obstacle to the model’s
application to written texts. The question is, however: is it therefore also applicable
to written literary texts? It could be said that literature, in (prototypically) producing
a world fully or partially separate from the “real” world, is governed by a separate set
of constraints and separate ways of manipulating these constraints. Although the
former is probably true to an extent (there is, for example, little doubt that a set of
narrative constraints with maxim-like properties will exist within literature), it has
also been argued that since we use the same model of linguistic-communicative
competence when producing both fictional and “real” utterances, the difference
between the two products, at least those to do with the manipulation of the linguis-
tic output, is not a principled one. The model that we use, Tannen and Lakoff claim,
consists of
the knowledge a speaker has at his/her disposal to determine what s/he can expect to
hear in a discourse, and what s/he is reasonably expected to contribute, in terms of the
implicitly internalized assumptions made in her/his speech community about such
matters. (Tannen and Lakoff 1994: 139)
This obviously encompasses the CP. And what it means is that if we can assume that
something akin to the CP is in operation in “real” discourse, we can also assume that
it is in operation in producing and interpreting a literary text, despite the existence
of additional genre-specific constraints.
One difference that could be assumed to exist between the functioning of the CP
in non-fictional and fictional discourse is that in the case of the latter, the maxims
plus other, genre-specific constraints will operate on two different levels: 1) between
the characters in the text (attended to by the reader), and 2) between the author and/
or narrator and reader. Obviously, there are clear parallels to the former situation
also in the world of non-fictional discourse: written non-fiction often reports dia-
logue, and in oral interaction we often overhear others’ conversations. This does not
mean, of course, that it is not important to distinguish between the two levels in the
analysis, and the focus here will be on the latter level, on the exchange between the
author and/or narrator and the reader. And this brings up an additional consider-
ation, namely the verisimilitudinal status of the author/narrator, since this may be
seen to have some bearing on whether or not the CP can be said to be in operation
in the author/narrator-reader relation. Within literary speech act theory, there are
01.Meta 56.3.cor 3.indd 540 12-02-22 10:14 PMtranslating breaches of intersubjective constraints on interaction 541
two opposing views, represented by those of the seminal contributors John Searle
(1975) and Mary Louise Pratt (1977). According to one of their commentators,
Michael Hancher, “Searle leaves open the old-fashioned possibility that the author
may on occasion be telling the story himself, whereas Pratt makes the more usual
assumption that the narrator will always be a fiction” (Hancher 1977: 1094). Here, a
third way is opted for: ordinary speakers, authors of non-fiction or of fiction are
always simultaneously both themselves and a fiction. The way ordinary speakers and
authors act out their identities is not in principle different; sometimes we align our-
selves closely with what we perceive to be our inner core, other times we act out
identities constructed on the basis of this perceived inner core plus other, borrowed
identities, in acts of imitating, playacting, parodying. The important thing is that
whether we align ourselves closely with our perceived inner core or not in the act of
producing a piece of discourse, we always draw on the model of linguistic-commu-
nicative competence described above, meaning that we use the CP, in principle, in
the same way. Whether or not a speaker, or a non-fiction or fiction author, is perceived
as being him or herself or something closer to a fiction by the reader, is, obviously,
something which will affect the latter’s interpretational process (in providing differ-
ent kinds of context for interpretation), but no perceivable situation of this kind will
affect the principled workings of the CP.
One thing that remains to be considered is the CP’s applicability to literary
translation. Malmkjær’s (1998) position in this matter is that the main obstacle in
this respect is that the theory of meaning that Grice’s CP rests on is untenable, in
itself, and in the context of translation. According to Grice, the understanding of
utterances depends on the hearer/reader’s understanding of the speaker/writer’s
intentions which in turn depends on his or her understanding of the speaker/writer’s
utterances (which is, obviously, problematic); and translation, arguably, severs the
connection between the reader and the author’s original intentions entirely anyway.
These problems mean, according to Malmkjær, that the usefulness of Grice’s CP in
analysing what goes on in translation remains unclear. Malmkjær does, however,
admit that removing this theory of meaning from the equation – in an interim period
whilst awaiting a more viable foundation theory – will not nullify the CP, and doing
exactly this in her article, she goes on to observe that many instances of flouting and
implicature in translated texts “can be explained by the theory of cooperation”
(Malmkjær 1998: 34). And what is being “explained” is how well a given source text
implicature has been preserved in the target text.
1.1. From “maxims,” via “norms,” to “intersubjective constraints
on interaction”
Moving on to the main concern of this paper, maxims are seen to be the main ingre-
dients in the flouting process leading to a-i effects and implicature, and thus identi-
fying the exact nature of maxims will give us an idea of how far the phenomenon of
flouting actually extends (and in turn, how widely we should cast our net when
trying to identify such phenomena and the ways in which they are being dealt with
in translation).
Grice himself only offers vague, and rather contradictory, clues as to what max-
ims might be. On the one hand, he sees them to somehow derive from human beings’
01.Meta 56.3.cor 3.indd 541 12-02-22 10:14 PM542 Meta, LVI, 3, 2011
inherently rational nature (“I would like to be able to think of the standard type of
conversational practice not merely as something that all or most do in fact follow but
as something that it is reasonable for us to follow” [Grice 1989: 29]); on the other
hand, he sees them as some kind of social, intersubjective entity that is “learned . . .
in childhood.” The most important clue to what maxims might be, however, stems
from Grice’s descriptions of what these maxims do: the fact that they can be breached
(to produce implicature, see above) strongly indicates that they are some kind of
normative entity.
The general norm theory outlined and discussed within translation studies offers
an enlightening point of departure for a more thorough understanding of maxims.
The nature of a norm, the core of which seems to be generally agreed on, is perhaps
most neatly summed up by Toury:
Sociologists and social psychologists have long regarded norms as the translation of
general values or ideas shared by a community – as to what is right and wrong, adequate
and inadequate – into performance instructions appropriate for and applicable to
particular situations, specifying what is prescribed and forbidden as well as what is
tolerated and permitted in a certain behavioural dimension… Norms are acquired by
the individual during his/her socialization and always imply sanctions – actual or
potential, negative as well as positive. (Toury 1995: 54-55)
This definition seems to cover the Gricean maxims as well: they are “performance
instructions” applicable to the particular situation of text production (and perhaps
also to other situations, see Grice 1989: 29). Note, furthermore, that the definition
echoes some of Grice’s own statements regarding these entities (for example the claim
that they are learned or acquired), and that it adds at least one important dimension
that Grice failed to emphasize, such as the fact that norms (including maxims) always
imply sanctions. This is important, since it explains the general floutability of norms
(see Greenall 2002),3 and by extension, the floutability of Gricean maxims, in the
sense that implied sanctions increase the likelihood of a breach being noticed, and
hence that an intended potential effect is achieved.
From a Gricean perspective, this reconceptualization of Gricean maxims as
norms has a number of repercussions. One of the most important ones is the clear
break with the idea that the maxims should form a limited, fixed (albeit extendable;
see Grice 1989: 28) set of entities which, moreover, because of Grice’s suggestion that
they might be anchored in human rationality, many have claimed to be universal or
criticized for not being universal (enough) (see overview in Greenall 2002), or have
more or less implicitly treated as something which ought to be universal (for exam-
ple, within the field of translation studies, Thomson 1982; Hohulin 1987; Hatim and
Mason 1990, 1997; Aghbar 1995; Okolo 1996; but see Baker 1992: 237-238, for an
opposing view). Conceiving of maxims as part of a set of (non-universal) floutable
norms, as is being done here, obviously forces reconsideration both of the phenom-
enon’s extent and its stability. These aspects will be dealt with in turn.
Firstly, whereas the category of “maxim” may have emerged as neat and manage-
able, the category of “norm” may, by contrast, appear unlimited. Are there ways of
circumscribing this category in any efficient sense? Translation studies norm theorists
have tried to do so, in trying to delimit the notion of norm using some notion of
“convention,” on the one hand, and some notion of “rule” on the other:
01.Meta 56.3.cor 3.indd 542 12-02-22 10:14 PMtranslating breaches of intersubjective constraints on interaction 543
– Idiosyncrasies – norms – rules (Toury 1995: 54)
– Conventions – norms – rules – decrees (Hermans 1996: 32)
– Conventions – norms – judicial laws (Chesterman 1993: 6; 1997: 55)
These scales are all seen as continua, with norms situated in the middle, weaker
convention-based regularities on the left of the scale, and some notion of rule (often
seen to involve codification and stronger sanctions) on the right. The details of these
theorists’ definitions of where one entity lets off and the other begins vary slightly,
which is only to be expected since there are no definite cut-off points, especially
between conventions and norms. The most important thing to bear in mind regard-
ing maxims-as-norms, however, is the following: obviously, Toury’s idiosyncrasies,
and the weaker end of the convention category will not be the right place for maxims,
since a certain frequency and regularity of a given behaviour and a certain measure
of implied sanction strength will be necessary for breaches (flouts) to be noticed and
hence be able to convey implicatures. In addition, maxims-as-norms will tend to
include the category of rule, since breaches of rules or laws can also in some cases be
intended and perceived as flouts, and convey implicatures. It is, for example, quite
possible to imagine someone causing someone else bodily harm or even committing
murder in order to convey a message (for example, hired thugs trying to bully some-
one into paying up, or gangs trying to warn other gangs off their territory). In other
words, if floutability is the criterion, then we need to go beyond the category of norm.
Thus, here, strong conventions, Gricean maxims and other norms (including narra-
tive and translational norms), rules, laws and decrees are all seen to belong to a broad
category of intersubjective constraints on interaction (Greenall 2002). Note that this
is not intended to entail a view of the category of intersubjective constraints on
interaction as one where one can necessarily postulate objectively existing members;
rather, maxims (and all other intersubjective constraints on interaction) are seen as
social assumptions that are constructed and re-constructed in each situation of use,
so that it is possibly “methodologically preferable to work out the maxims that each
language user [or social actor] is constructing in a given speech situation” (Robinson
2003: 131).
1.2. Aspects of the variability of intersubjective constraints on interaction
Norm theorists tend to emphasize the socio-cultural variability of norms; Toury is
one of them:
there is absolutely no need for a norm to apply – to the same extent, or at all – to all
sectors within a society. Even less necessary, or indeed likely, is it for a norm to apply
across cultures. In fact, “sameness” here is a mere coincidence – or else the result of
continuous contacts between subsystems within a culture, or between entire cultural
systems, and hence a manifestation of interference . . . Even then, it is often a matter
of apparent rather than of genuine identity. After all, significance is only attributed to
a norm by the system in which it is embedded, and the systems remain different even
if instances of external behaviour appear the same. (Toury 1995: 62)
Furthermore, Robinson’s (2003) view, that maxims (which are examples of
norms/intersubjective constraints on interaction) are constructed in situ, obviously
takes the idea of variability even further: not only do such entities vary across cultural
or social groupings, they may also vary from situation to situation. Here, however, it
01.Meta 56.3.cor 3.indd 543 12-02-22 10:14 PM544 Meta, LVI, 3, 2011
is important to take a sober view and emphasize the fact that there are obviously
forces that keep these entities intersubjectively manageable, i.e., there have to be fac-
tors that contribute to a shared core understanding of constraints – an understand-
ing of what they are, how they work and who they apply to – quite simply because
we do seem to share such understandings (this is evidenced, among other things, by
the fact, that without such a shared understanding, the constraints would not be able
to continue to perform their functions; see Hermans 1996: 26). Having said this, it
may well be the case that as soon as we wander “out of one social group and into
another (let alone out of one language and into another) [there] will always [be] […]
a certain amount of uncertainty as to the maxims that govern speech” (Robinson
2003: 130). Here, Robinson might be right in assuming that uncertainty might set in
as early as at the point when one crosses over into another social group, but it is
nevertheless reasonable to believe that “culture” (Robinson’s “language”?) – despite
the fact that most cultures will consist of an intermix of different cultures – is the
most likely demarcation point for a transition into potentially (completely) unknown
territory: within a culture, people are at least likely to know the same constraints,
even though they don’t necessarily feel that they all apply to them; across cultures
not even this knowledge is (normally) shared. Hence, the legitimacy of the below
outline of types of cross-cultural variability.
1.3. Types of cross-cultural variability
The first type of variation is the simplest one:
a) Constraint X occurs in culture A, but not in culture B.
A possible example here might be Basil Hatim’s “‘evaluation’ maxim” (Hatim
1997: 118) as it applies to Arabic rhetoric. This “maxim” dictates that one’s contribu-
tion should always cater to the rhetorical needs of those who support one’s views,
ignoring those who do not (Hatim 1997: 171), and is not seen to occur in English-
speaking cultures.
b) Constraint X occurs both in cultures A and B, but in different sub-cultures, speech
situations or genres in the different cultures.
An example here might be provided by Grice’s first maxim of Quantity (Be as
informative as is required), which seems to be rather prevalent and generally applies
across the board in English-speaking societies (culture A). Keenan (1976), in her
famous study of verbal interactions in a Malagasy society, found that this maxim is
not an expected feature of many speech situations in this society (culture B): “The
expectation that a speaker will observe such a norm varies according to context […].
A speaker is more likely to withhold information when that information is significant
than when it is not significant” (Keenan 1976: 76).
c) Constraint X occurs both in cultures A and B, but is interpreted differently in the
two cultures; that is, different kinds of action or different degrees of intensity of
the same action are needed in order to fulfil the requirements of the constraint.
An example of this kind of situation might be found in the difference between
English and German discourse, as described here by Mona Baker:
01.Meta 56.3.cor 3.indd 544 12-02-22 10:14 PMtranslating breaches of intersubjective constraints on interaction 545
unlike English, German discourse is non-linear and favours digressions. In some
extreme cases, such as Fritz Schutze’s Sprache soziologisch gesehen, there are “not only
digressions […] but also digressions from digressions. Even within the conclusion, there
are digressions.” (Clyne 1981: 63, quoted in Baker 1992: 235-236)
This suggests a stricter interpretation of the maxim of Relation in English than
in German discourse, in the sense that for an English-speaking audience, the rele-
vance requirement is fulfilled sooner than it is for a German-speaking audience. Or,
put differently, in order to “Be relevant,” German speakers/writers have to say more
(i.e., provide a higher degree of intensity of the given action).
d) Constraint X exists both in cultures A and B, but is put to different (textual) uses
in the different cultures.
This is a scenario where examples do not seem to abound; however, Hatim and
Mason (1997: 140) do make a reasonably convincing case for the fact that in English-
speaking discourse, the first maxim of Quality is the maxim most often used to
create irony, whereas in Arabic, this maxim is not used for that purpose at all. What
is used instead is the second maxim of Quantity. In other words, while English speak-
ers/writers signal that something is ludicrously not the case by saying things that are
plainly not true, Arab speakers/writers will tend to do so by using repetition and
other kinds of stacking of information (see Hatim 1997: 196-197).
e) Constraint X occurs in both cultures A and B, but is “stronger” in culture A than
in culture B.
This represents a quite subtle, hitherto virtually uninvestigated, type of vari-
ability, despite the fact that it is of great importance (something which will be evi-
denced by the case presented below – that of translating swearing from English into
Norwegian). What is meant by saying that constraint X is stronger in culture A than
in culture B is the following: even within one and the same culture, some constraints
are more strictly enforced than others, i.e., they are more strongly normative than
others. Obviously, an unwritten convention dictating when to wear and when not to
wear a tie, or a maxim stating that one should avoid prolixity (one of Grice’s Manner
maxims) will be less strongly normative than a codified law, such as one prohibiting
the taking of human lives. Here, too, however, it is important to bear in mind that
constraints in general, including considerations of their strength, are socially variable
and negotiable in situ, and thus that constraint-strength, too, will vary across social
groups and situations. Again, however, there will be an intersubjectively identifiable
core strength, a point of departure, so to speak, for strength calculations in situ. And
this core (understanding of) constraint strength will most likely ensure a relatively
fixed hierarchy of strengths between conventions and norms on the one hand and
codified laws, etc. on the other within one and the same culture, and also a relative
stability across situations which makes it reasonable to talk about the same constraint
(to the extent that constraints can ever be the same across cultures (see Toury 1995:
62, above) being more strongly normative in culture A than in culture B.
This kind of scenario obviously presents challenges for translation, not least
because of the frequent demand for equivalent effect. A recent expansion of the
Gricean scheme to include a consideration of the potential a-i effect of a flout (i.e.,
heightened attention and increased interpretational activity [Greenall 2002: 208-265])
01.Meta 56.3.cor 3.indd 545 12-02-22 10:14 PM546 Meta, LVI, 3, 2011
was mentioned at the outset. As a general rule, breaches of weak constraints will
cause weaker a-i effects than the breach of a stronger constraint. Thus, if the same
constraint is weak in the SC and strong in the TC, and the translator does not take
this into account, then he or she might end up with stronger a-i effects in the TT. In
the following, we take a look at a translation from English into Norwegian where this
has arguably happened.
2. Breaches of the swearing constraint in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments
and their translation into Norwegian
As regards the notion of swearing, a useful point of departure is provided by Anna-
Brita Stenström’s definition of swearwords as words
which are totally or partly prohibited in social intercourse, [and] are often referred to
as “taboo words” […] in particular concepts related to religion, sex and excretion […].
If such words are used figuratively, signalling the speaker’s emotions and attitudes,
they are used for swearing. (Stenström 1991: 239)
What this definition indicates, is that swearwords flout constraints on two dif-
ferent levels; firstly, they flout a swearing – or “taboo” – constraint4 (producing, as
shall be seen, social or expressive implicature), and additionally, they flout Grice’s
maxim of Relation, producing figurative meaning (hence fucking, for example, at one
point implicated [something like] very, a meaning which has now become conven-
tionalized, in terms of having become a generalized conversational implicature [Grice
1989: 37-38]). Both breaches cause(d) a potential a-i effect, but it is nevertheless mostly
breach of the swearing constraint that concerns me here.
The Irish novelist Roddy Doyle’s texts are littered with swearwords. The fact that
this constitutes a breach of a constraint in Ireland (and elsewhere in the world where
the novel is read), is evidenced by the fact that “Doyle has often been accused of
overusing bad language in his novels” (Asián and McCullough 1998: 57). Doyle’s
defense against such accusations reveals his acknowledgement of the existence of the
constraint:
That’s the way the characters talk, it’s plain and simple, what more can I say? Not all
the characters use bad language. Pound for pound, The Van has more bad language
than the rest, because it’s largely Jimmy Sr’s story, and he’s a man who laces his language
continually with four-letter words of various shapes and sizes, and I don’t make any
apology for that. I have no problem justifying the bad language. There’s very little
violence in it and it’s not there for shock value. In a culture where many films are cre-
ated purely to shock people, trying to shock people by a choice of words doesn’t work
anymore. (McArdle 1995: 113)
Doyle’s acknowledgement of the constraint lies, among other things, in his
acceptance of the notion that swearing constitutes “bad language.” The quote also
reveals, however, a number of other interesting observations that Doyle has made
regarding constraint breaches. He notes, for instance, the fact that breaching con-
straints can be used for purposes of characterization (“That’s the way the characters
talk”); he realizes the attention-getting potential of constraint breaches (what he calls
their “shock value”), and he notes – in line with the pivot claim made in this paper
– that some constraints may be stronger than others (i.e., [visual] representations of
01.Meta 56.3.cor 3.indd 546 12-02-22 10:14 PMtranslating breaches of intersubjective constraints on interaction 547
violence can be more powerful than swearing). Finally, he defends himself against
his detractors by pointing out that constraint strength is something that changes over
time, and that this particular constraint has indeed done so: “trying to shock people
by a choice of words doesn’t work anymore.”
Doyle’s work The Commitments is the first of three novels in the Barrytown
Trilogy. It is the story of a group of unemployed, working class youths from Dublin
who decide to get together to start a soul band. The group’s class affiliation and the
fact that the text of the novel is largely made up of a large number of (written repre-
sentations of) spoken dialogue are all likely reasons behind the choice to introduce
such a richness of expletives in this particular work: the working classes are generally
seen to swear more freely than the rest of society (although there is also evidence to
prove that, for example, certain age groups, irrespective of class belonging, give the
working classes ample competition in this respect; see for example Stenström 2006),
and spoken genres generally contain more swearing than written ones (Farr and
Murphy 2009). Here is an extract (1a) which provides some of the flavour of the book
as a whole; the band is arguing over whether or not they should cover a song by
Depeche Mode:
(1a) – It’s just fuckin’ art school stuff, said Jimmy.
[…]
– Hang on, Jimmy, he [Derek] said. – That’s not fair now. The Beatles went to art
school.
– That’s different.
– Me hole it is, said Derek. – An’ Roxy Music went to art school an’ you have all
their albums, so yeh can fuck off with yourself.
Jimmy was fighting back a redner.
– I didn’t mean it like tha’, he said. – It’s not the fact tha’ they went to art school
that’s wrong with them. It’s – (Jimmy was struggling.) – more to do with – (Now
he had something.) – the way their stuff, their songs like, are aimed at gits like
themselves. Wankers with funny haircuts. An’ rich das.
– An’ fuck all else to do all day ‘cept prickin’ around with synths.
– Tha’ sounds like me arse, said Outspan. – But I’m sure you’re righ.’
(Doyle 1988: 4-5; my emphasis)
Swearing in this novel is essentially an expression of the anger and frustration
of its working class characters, and, within the work, gets aimed both at the “others”
(Wankers with . . . rich das) and, seemingly misplacedly, at other members of their
group, whenever tempers rise (Derek to Jimmy: Me hole it is). The explanation of the
latter phenomenon resides, of course, in the fact that swearing is a strong marker of
group identity, and hence gets used across the board, not merely vis-à-vis the class
enemy. No matter whom it is directed at within the work, however, the main point
here is that vis-à-vis the reader, the swearing is possibly the most important tool for
projecting the aggressive, frustrated working class backdrop against which everything
else in the book must be understood (see Ghassempur, forthcoming), the main message
of the book being how the band becomes a place where its members actually manage
to pick up a scrap of self-worth, enabling them to see possible avenues out of their
miserable lives.
01.Meta 56.3.cor 3.indd 547 12-02-22 10:14 PM548 Meta, LVI, 3, 2011
2.1. Translating the potential a-i effect
Literary “evidence,” of the kind found in The Commitments, gets company from an
overwhelming amount of anecdotal evidence testifying to the fact that Irish English
speakers – and perhaps especially Dubliners (see Hickey 2005: 141) – swear a lot.5
Recently, this kind of evidence has, however, been backed up by evidence of a some-
what harder kind. In a recent corpus linguistics study, O’Keeffe and Adolphs (2008:
81) note a higher frequency of use of swearwords as response tokens among Irish
English speakers than British English speakers. In another corpus linguistics study,
Farr and Murphy (in press) note a generally higher frequency of use of swearwords
among Irish English speakers as compared to their use in several other varieties of
English. Although both of these studies are limited to spoken language and to swear-
words within a limited semantic domain (the religious domain), they are nevertheless
making a good start at consolidating the folk-linguistic conception of Irish English
speakers as liberal swearers.
The connection between a large amount of swearwords used by individuals
within a culture on the one hand and the relative strength of the swearing constraint
on the other is of course by no means straightforward: insistent repetitions of a “for-
bidden” act can be evidence of violent resistance to a strong, but somehow unpopu-
lar constraint; however, it is more likely a reflection of a constraint that is weak or
that has weakened. This is more likely not least because of the fact that repetitive
breach will tend to – precisely – weaken constraints. Hence, it is concluded that for
Irish English speakers, the swearing constraint is generally relatively weak, something
which seems to be supported by O’Keeffe and Adolph’s observation that “The Irish
speakers seem to accept swearing as a normal and frequent response token” (O’Keeffe
and Adolphs 2008: 81).
Note that positing some such thing as a general constraint strength might be seen
as problematic, insofar as the group of Irish English speakers cannot be claimed to
be in any way homogenous, and exactly how strong or weak a constraint is perceived
to be by any one individual within this speech community will depend on, for
example, their sociolinguistic affiliation (see Allan and Burridge 2006: 237), their
cultural progeny (since a speech community need not be culturally homogeneous),
and finally, on how individuals re-construct the constraint in any given situation.
Furthermore, being a novel with broad appeal written in a language of wider com-
munication, the book’s readership will also extend far beyond the Irish English speech
community. It may nevertheless be useful, for purposes of comparison, to generalize
across this group, and this may also be a more justifiable course of action than it might
initially seem to be: firstly, authors and translators of works such as The Commitments
often have to write with a generalized reader in mind, and secondly, the majority of
readers within this larger speech community will have at least some stereotypical
conceptions regarding the status of the swearing constraint in the Irish English speech
community, and will hence have the necessary background for “borrowing” (if they
will) the reactions and responses of the most immediate target group of readers (this
being a potential aspect of the process of identifying oneself with the world presented
by a work of fiction). The generalized reader postulated here is hence someone who
is either a member of a (heterogeneous) core group of source text readers sharing at
least some of this group’s characteristics, or someone capable of aligning themselves
01.Meta 56.3.cor 3.indd 548 12-02-22 10:14 PMtranslating breaches of intersubjective constraints on interaction 549
– and likely to align themselves – with this core group, because they have some
understanding of shared conceptions of, among other things, constraint strength.
These general remarks also hold for the readers of the Norwegian translation
(The Commitments – Da soul’en kom til Dublin [1994]6). And with this in mind, it
could be said that the swearing constraint for a generalized Norwegian reader is less
weak. Although there is very little hard evidence to back this claim up, the assump-
tion is nevertheless a reasonable one to make: in addition to a strong folk perception
that Norwegians are poorer swearers than, for example, the Swedes (Jenstad 1987:
44) or the English (who, as we have seen, are well underway to be proved to swear
less than the Irish), there are several indications that Norwegians are still very hung
up in their “puritan traditions” (Tveit 2004: 112). Norwegian swearwords being
mainly from the domain of religion means, for example, that they constantly fuel the
resistance of the actively Christian population of Norway, resulting in much attention
to this topic in the press in the form of debate and attempts at putting a muzzle on
Norwegians who swear.7 An additional indication is the recorded effects of a transla-
tion such as that of The Commitments into Norwegian on a Norwegian audience,
represented, in this instance, by a handful of colleagues who were asked, informally,
to assess selected parts of the translation. The following extract (1b) was, by all,
experienced as unduly attention-demanding, strange, unnatural, exaggerated and/
or (even) shocking:8
(1b) – Det er sånn jævla kunstskoledritt, sa Jimmy.
[…]
– Stopp nå, Jimmy, sa han [Derek] – Det er urettferdig. The Beatles gikk på kunst-
skole.
– Det er noe annet.
– Faen heller om det er, sa Derek. – Og Roxy Music gikk på kunstskole og du har
alle lp’ene deres, så du kan bare gå hjem og drite og legge deg.
Jimmy kjempa med rødfargen i ansiktet.
– Jeg mente det ikke sånn, sa han. – Det er ikke det at de gikk på den forpulte
kunstskolen som er feil. Det er (Jimmy kjempa) mer det at (Nå var han inne på
noe) greiene deres, låtene, er retta mot kødder som dem sjøl. Ronketasser med
bedritne frisyrer. Og rik pappa. Og ikke en faens dritt å gjøre på hele dagen, annet
enn å klå på synther.
– Det der høres ut som ræva mi, sa Outspan. – Men du har vel rett.
(Doyle 1888/1994: 10, translated by Ragnar Hovland; my emphasis)
The problems with this passage have both a qualitative and quantitative dimen-
sion. Apart from the fact that expressions such as the following:
(2) jævla kunstskoledritt
[devilish art-school shit]
(3) du kan bare gå hjem og drite og legge deg
[you can just go home and have a shit and go to bed]
will tend to seriously singe the sensibilities of many Norwegian readers, the relatively
high frequency of breaches of the swearing constraint in the original is replicated in
the Norwegian translation, creating an unusually high frequency of breaches for a
similar Norwegian situation (the same thing was found to be the case in the transla-
tion of The Commitments into German; see Horton 1998: 425). Matters are not
improved by the fact that the translator, Ragnar Hovland, merely within the short
01.Meta 56.3.cor 3.indd 549 12-02-22 10:14 PM550 Meta, LVI, 3, 2011
span of this passage, has found room to add two swearwords where there are none
in the Irish-English original, namely
(4) art school
den forpulte kunstskolen
[that fucking art school]
(5) with funny haircuts
med bedritne frisyrer
[with shitty haircuts]
The result is most likely a rather sizeable distance between the potential a-i effect of
the text on the SC audience at large vs. that on the TC audience.
The difference in constraint strength alone is however in this case not what
generates the difference in potential a-i effect between the ST and the TT. Another
important factor in determining the general level of this effect is whether or not the
flout producing it has become conventionalized. Because the claim that flouting causes
heightened attention and increased interpretational activity to an extent which is
proportional to the strength of the breached constraint only holds fully in situations
where the flout is fresh – that is, where the textual vehicle (expression) that carries
the breach and all the other co-textual and contextual elements that contribute to
the given flout and the attendant implicature have only appeared in that particular
combination a few times (in a given speech community). If the flout is not fresh in
this sense, but rather conventionalized (by virtue of frequent repetition of the co-
textual/contextual constellation just described; see Robinson 2003: 125), the potential
for causing heightened attention and increased interpretational activity diminishes.
For example, whereas a freshly created metaphor, such as My love is a flight of stairs
(a flout of Grice’s first maxim of Quality), will have a maximal potential for creating
an a-i effect, an old and trite one, such as My love is a red rose will not have the same
potency (although, obviously, the degree to which any of these potentialities are
actualized will vary across groups, individuals and situations within a given speech
community).
As far as swearing is concerned, the vehicle of the flout of the swearing con-
straint, i.e., the product of the flout of Grice’s maxim of Relation (the figurative
meaning), is often highly conventionalized, at least for the core group of target read-
ers (for example, in The Commitments: fuck, fuckin’, fuck all, fuck off, gits, wankers,
etc.) (see Hasund 2005: 26-27). The fact that swearing, despite this fact, often manages
to make itself noticed by a majority of the audience, merely testifies to the realness
of the swearing constraint. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that if swearing should
come in the form of a fresh coinage (i.e., a fresh flout of the maxim of Relation), it
would have an even stronger potential impact than usual. This is something which
a translator should perhaps be particularly aware of, since the lack of a reasonably
equivalent conventionalized swearword might tempt one to coin a new one, some-
thing that would amount to a fresh flout, which would, in turn, produce a much
stronger response in a (generalized) TT audience than the conventionalized original
would manage to produce in the (generalized) ST audience.
It would be tempting to conclude that the Norwegian translator of The Commit-
ments is not very aware of this problem: whereas a number of conventionalized flouts
are indeed translated as conventionalized flouts, quite a few others, even where close
01.Meta 56.3.cor 3.indd 550 12-02-22 10:14 PMtranslating breaches of intersubjective constraints on interaction 551
conventionalized equivalents exist, are translated by means of new coinages. Three
extracts from (1a) and (1b) deserve special mention:
(6) yeh can fuck off with yourself
du kan bare gå hjem og drite og legge deg
[you can just go home and have a shit and go to bed]
(7) Wankers
Ronketasser
[Masturbating manikins]
(8) Tha’ sounds like me arse
Det der høres ut som ræva mi
[That there sounds like my arse]
All of the three originals are conventionalized flouts (at least to an audience
reasonably familiar with Irish English usage), whereas all of the translations are, to
my knowledge, new coinages. Example (6) stands out by virtue of the fact that fuck
off with yourself has a perfectly acceptable conventionalized equivalent in Norwegian,
namely dra til helvete (med deg); literally, go to hell (with yourself). Instead of adopt-
ing this possibility the translator has chosen to move from the domain of religion
(prevalent in Norwegian swearing) to the domain of excretion (less prevalent in
Norwegian swearing), and also to insert the word from this latter domain (drite) in
an elaborate, new expression which, precisely because of its newness, is highly
attention-grabbing. The translation of Wankers (7), which has no conventionalized
counterpart in Norwegian, is translated into Ronketasser. This translation combines
the notion of masturbation with the notion of a small person to form the non-pre-
existing compound Masturbating manikins, which has an even stronger effect (per-
haps to the degree of a shock, for some readers). The translation in example (8)
constitutes a more or less direct transfer of the English source, which results in
another new coinage. Direct transfers – as long as they, like here, do not correspond
to a pre-existing lexical item or structure in the target language – will always start
out as non-conventionalized and will hence generally be rather more noticeable than
their ST counterparts. All of this leads to the conclusion that if equivalent effect is
aimed for (for a generalized segment of the audience), then conventionalized flouts
will have to be rendered by flouts with a similar degree of conventionalization, even
when this might entail a loss of semantic and pragmatic meaning. Which brings us,
of course, to a closer consideration of – precisely – the meaning conveyed by the flouts
in question.
2.2. Translating the implicature(s)
So far, the main consideration has been of the strength of the flout’s potential a-i
effect and the challenges involved in re-creating comparable levels of this effect in
the TT (if this is desirable). The a-i effect does, however, also have a content side which
has to be considered. The process which has been termed increased interpretational
activity does have an outcome (implicature), although this outcome is probably much
less circumscribeable than has generally been assumed in the post-Gricean literature
(Greenall 2002: 248-265). Despite this relatively low level of circumscribeability, one
simplifying working distinction will nevertheless be made, namely between two
01.Meta 56.3.cor 3.indd 551 12-02-22 10:14 PM552 Meta, LVI, 3, 2011
different types of implicature which often co-occur. One, the traditional type, we
could call coherence-preserving implicature, the other has been termed social impli-
cature (Mao 1996) or expressive implicature (Altieri 1981). Coherence-preserving
implicature arises when communicators use an utterance with a given “literal” con-
tent to communicate a related or completely different (“nonliteral”) message where
the latter ensures that the utterance contributes a meaningful piece in the textual
coherence chain. All swearwords convey coherence-preserving implicatures (non-
conventionalized or conventionalized ones). Fucking, for example, as mentioned at
the outset, was originally a flout of the maxim of Relation producing the implicature
very, the latter obviously being needed to preserve the coherence when the word is
inserted into contexts such as fuckin’ art school stuff in (1a). All swearwords also,
however, convey social or expressive implicature, and these arise when speakers
perform a flout for the purpose of conveying an implicature that says something
about who they are (see Altieri 1981: 88). Swearwords, being breaches of a swearing
constraint with taboo value, typically generate this type of implicature. Fucking, for
example, in the context of The Commitments, may be said to convey a social/expres-
sive implicature to the effect of “I am a working-class Dubliner and an aspiring
musician (and hence tough, cool, determined, etc.” (see the notion of covert prestige,
for example Ljung 1987: 20), which establishes a ubiquitous context for everything
else that goes on in the novel. In this way, social/expressive implicatures, too, con-
tribute to the coherence chain, but in a different way from coherence-preserving
implicatures. Rather than linking individual, identifiable utterances together in a
co-text-context interplay, they create, within literary works, characterizations which
may form general themes hovering under and above the text, connecting other,
apparently unrelated elements in the work.
The next question concerns how these implicatures – coherence-preserving and/
or social/expressive – fare in the translation. If we look again at examples (6 – 8) we
get a clear impression that at least in these examples, the coherence-preserving impli-
catures have been prioritized, to the detriment of the social implicature: in (6) – yeh
can fuck off with yourself – the coherence-preserving implicature “I violently disagree”
(or something to that effect) is reasonably well conveyed by the Norwegian du kan
bare gå hjem og drite og legge deg (which, we recall, translates literally into you can
just go home and have a shit and go to bed). The same is the case in (7) and (8), where
the coherence-preserving implicatures “Good-for-nothing,” and “That’s just silly
talk,” respectively, are generally as (re-) producable by the target-text reader as by the
source-text reader. If we turn to the social implicatures, however, things immediately
become less clear-cut. Whereas the ST examples convey the social implicature men-
tioned earlier (“I am a working-class Dubliner and an aspiring musician [and hence
tough, cool, determined, etc.]”), it is rather difficult to say what the TT “equivalents”
convey. They certainly do not convey what the ST conveys. If anything, they seem to
(socially) implicate something like: “I am a bit clever, aren’t I, making up all of this
interesting swearing.”
Part of the problem seems to be that swearing in itself does not necessarily
express (the right kind of) group affiliation (or, in other words, the right kind of
specification of the generalized social implicature associated with swearing). For that,
the right kind of swearing is also a necessity. And for swearing – or anything else,
really – to be of any kind at all, it will have to be recognizable, in other words, it will
01.Meta 56.3.cor 3.indd 552 12-02-22 10:14 PMtranslating breaches of intersubjective constraints on interaction 553
have had to be uttered before, perhaps up to the point where it will have become,
precisely, conventionalized. It may seem to be the case that fresh swearing basically
takes us out of the realm of expression of group identity, and into the realm of expres-
sion of individual identity. Thus, the Norwegian translation, where many of the
examples are fresh coinages, only manages to establish a very unstable projection of
group identity, much unlike the ST, where this principle is very strong. The reader of
the translation never really feels certain what the individual’s group affiliation is, or
whether there indeed exists a group that this particular type of language use is con-
nected to, and will therefore have no choice but to pin the verbal gymnastics on the
individual’s project of projecting him or herself as individual, which creates a rather
different context for the interpretation of the novel for the target audience.
3. Concluding remarks
The focus of this paper has been on differences in the normative strength of inter-
subjective constraints on interaction across (and within) cultures, and on the chal-
lenges that this might pose for translators, since these differences in strength will, in
typical cases, lead to a difference in potential a-i effect when the same constraint is
flouted in the ST and the TT. This point was illustrated by a look at selected examples
of breaches of the swearing constraint in the Irish-English novel The Commitments
and its translation, since, it was claimed, the swearing constraint is, generally, nor-
matively weaker in Irish than in Norwegian culture (although much headroom must
be made here for intracultural variability). The fact that the translator has translated
all of the swearing and more will constitute too-strong a breach of the already stron-
ger Norwegian swearing constraint, and the result will be a stronger potential a-i
effect for the target audience. The fact that the translator also often chooses to trans-
late conventionalized breaches of the swearing constraint by means of non-conven-
tionalized ones contributes, it was claimed, to this effect. A further consequence of
the latter is a marked blurring of the social/expressive implicature, which is possibly
a lamentable fact, since, it was pointed out, the latter is important, in this novel, as a
backdrop for its general interpretation.
A possible objection to this kind of conclusion might be that it may seem to be
based on the view that translating is first and foremost a matter of reproducing
authors’ intentions,9 or, in other words, that it does not take into consideration the
translator’s role as an independent actor with a license to flout of his or her own
(Robinson 2003: 137-138). Rather than being oblivious to the differences in constraint
strength in the examples discussed, it may be the case that the translator has delib-
erately chosen to disregard it, that he has deliberately chosen to breach or flout the
ubiquitous translational norm or constraint dictating that equivalent effect should
be aimed for. Even if this were the case, however, it ought to be legitimate to ask what
the translator hoped to achieve in doing this, and whether or not he has achieved it
(the breach of a constraint is, after all, only redeemable by virtue of a purposeful and
successful outcome [Grice 1989]). The likely answer in this day and age would be that
the translator hoped to achieve some foreignizing effect (Venuti 1997). And to the
question of whether or not the translator has achieved this the answer is a tentative
yes, insofar as breaches and/or flouts of well-established translational norms tend to
bring about precisely this effect. The question is, however, even if this effect has been
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